


the creaking of the tented sky

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-26
Updated: 2011-10-26
Packaged: 2017-10-24 23:32:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/269135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jadesprite, ascending. Spoilers for the EoA.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the creaking of the tented sky

You don’t feel her die, which seems kind of unfair; you know she felt every flaming pound of your death, the weight that burnt you into the waiting earth. But you’re stuck inside the ghost of your best friend, and you feel nothing at all, when the delicate patterns of electricity that made Jade Harley braver than you fade from her bleeding brain. 

Dave is looking at you. The light shines through him, but you can see your (second) stupid meteor-borne doom reflected in his glasses. Afterwards, you will think that you were about to tell him something. Probably you were! But here and now, you run your teeth along the points of your sharp teeth and suck back the snot of your sadness. You have yet to open your mouth.  

Then:

A sound, in your ear. It is so small. A sound like the whirring your garden made when you wished open the window, and a breeze from oracular skies ran through the dreamed leaves— a burst of motion that changed the contours of space, around your skin. It has nothing to do with reckonings, or words said at the end of things.

Wings, you think, clearly. Small wings moving to the beat of small hearts.

 _And—_

One of the strange things about being a sprite is that you’re semipermeable; you can choose whether to hold a thing or to let it fall through your hand with a shimmer and a hiss. It’s an itchy sensation, the need for a choice, in every moment, of how to interact with the world; of how far to let it in. 

What happens next is like that feeling, unquantifiably magnified.

The universe surrounds you. It  _laps_  at you, hungry as an ocean or a dog. You are filled with the sudden, crystalline awareness of every shining point in space, from reality’s furthest rim to its bright, weeping center. The tears caught trembling in your eyes— you know them, in their dimensions and their faint movement. You know them like the wheeling of far stars. 

You know where Jade, the real Jade, lies dead, her fingers slack against sleek-gleaming stone.

Sprites know about godhood. It’s the business of sprites to give their players answers, even if you were really bad at it. But nowhere ( _nowhere,_ an impossible word) in all your uploaded wisdom is there mention of this.

It’s not an answer, anyway. It’s a question. You are edge to edge with all of space, and for the first time in your afterlife you are awake; and there is something enormous being asked.

You were brave once in your life, and then you died.

 _maybe itd be different if you had the same chance_

The light shines through him, and through you; and you know where the photons pass, like planets in your sight.

Even enormous things can fit inside the hand. 

 _Yes,_ you think. You close your hand around the waiting air.

And _rise._


End file.
